words: nikki wright
shutter: hamish brown

The Chemical Brothers, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons, are back with their fifth studio album in 10 years, eerily entitled Push the Button. With the cover art of an uprising fist inside a human head, it almost suggests the harsh reality of a world on the brink Armageddon. As usual, the boys have found interesting guest vocal collaborations with all-new faces except for one of their first and favourites: Tim Burgess of The Charlatan's UK singing on "The Boxer." Their first single "Galvanize" has Q-Tip (A Tribe Called Quest) in a unique-sounding track for both artists, and Mos Def's stepbrother Anwar Superstar providing strong lyrical presence on "Left Right." Other contributions include Kele Okereke from Bloc Party, Tom & Ed's favourite new band The Magic Numbers as well as the siren-like voice of Anna Lynne Williams from Trespassers William—a voice that could rival that of Sarah McLachlan. And so they've done it again, giving us a little of what we come to anticipate with every new Chemical Brothers album, plus much more, as they continue to evolve and explore new sounds and territories. We had a brief opportunity to catch up with Tom and talk about the new album:

Klublife: Let's start with the opening single, "Galvanize," with Q-Tip. Can you discuss how this collaboration came about?

Tom Rowlands: We had been big fans of the music he's made and of his voice and A Tribe Called Quest, definitely a band both Ed and I loved when we were growing up. And more recently, his album Amplified (in 1999) stood as a real favourite of mine. We had been working on the instrumental of the track, and it was this heavy, quite hard track, and we really liked how his vocal sounded—how he got wrapped in between the beat. He's got a very fluid style and it just seemed a voice we really imagined on the track. And also was the fact that he's a very open-minded artist, he's willing to experiment and willing to try different things. We wanted someone who would be open and get off on making this different kind of sound, not someone who was too trapped in their own idea of what they should be, especially how some hip hop artists are. Q-Tip's last two records are pretty wild records, and it's that spirit we liked. We sent him a piece of music from the CD and he was excited to talk to on the phone and keen to do it. We went to New York, got into the studio together and hey presto…"Galvanize!"

The Chemical Brothers

KL: So how did the word "galvanize" come into the spotlight?

TR: We had the main groove of the track in the start, and all the main sections…when we went to New York. We had the vocal phrase "don't hold back," that was the idea that we had…that was the seed for it all. When we were in the studio, he free-styled from that core of "don't hold back" and everything came around that. He said "galvanize" in some line, and we really focused on that saying. It was a wicked word and we hadn't really heard that word in that context before…it's a word with dynamics and action. The whole "my finger's on the button" section just came about in the studio, and when we got back to London, we put in the machine, answering or tempting him "to push the button"…the whole idea kind of grew and grew.

KL: What about Anwar Superstar: did you originally try to approach Mos Def, or did you want him more specifically?

TR: A long time ago, in '99, we wanted to work with Mos Def but it didn't happen. We only found out he was Mos Def's stepbrother about a month ago. The instrumental track that you hear is a really heavy hip hop kind of thing, and we were thinking it'd be great to find a voice, but we didn't necessarily want a voice you have a real preconception about. A friend of ours had got these demos he had done, like three tracks from a CD, and that's all we knew about him. But his voice sounded so strong, he had strong lyrical ideas, so we just experimented and sent him the music and he was excited to do it. Actually we booked the studio in New York, we came in the day after we had our Q-Tip session and we were waiting in there for him to turn up and he never turned up (laughs)! We were like "oh my God where is he?" And we thought, ah well, we'll just do without! But when we got back to the UK, he'd already worked out his words and put them down to CD and they were waiting for us, so I don't know if he just freaked out before the studio session or he was writing too busily. That was the only collaboration we've done where we've never been in the same room with the vocalist. But his ideas are just so strong and he had worked everything out really well so that it was easy…it was fun.

KL: Do you think these collaborations with Q-Tip and Anwar might open up the minds of American hip-hop culture?

TR: I don't think so. I think that world is pretty self-contained. It seems to me it doesn't really work like that. For us, the exciting thing is that we love hip-hop music, but we like twisting it to how we imagine it. When we started, we liked the idea of acid-house music and hip-hop music being put together. We were making tracks like "Song to the Siren" and "Chemical Beats" and stuff…and they were totally influenced by the fact that when we were 15 we were really into hip hop, and then a year later acid-house exploded in England. And those two things being put together was the concept—this idea we had of something people hadn't done, and something like "Galvanize" to us is the finite point, the end point of that kind of idea. It's not like in some way we'll break into the American hip-hop market, because I don't believe that's how it works in America; it's more about being part of an identifiable scene. Those big hip-hop records, they have a strong personality that people are buying into. We made that record so we could play it in nightclubs basically, and that's been the inspiration for a lot of the music we've made, and it's stood us pretty well. I think if you try and start making music to fit into someone else's idea of what could be successful or what it should be, then that's when it all goes wrong. You have to make records for yourself, because if you make one for someone else and they don't like it and then you don't like it…you didn't make the record you wanted to make and no one's happy.

KL: Discuss the events of writing "Hold Tight London" with Anna Lynne Williams from Trespassers William.
TR: On this record we had an open approach to working with singers. Before, we generally worked with people with a lot of music history behind them, like Bernard Sumner. We might have most of the records New Order had made or Joy Division had made. On this record we felt we would experiment, and we'd heard Anna Lynne Williams. I think I heard one of her band's tracks on the radio, and I really enjoyed the song but also I could hear in her voice there was something that might work with our music, and I tracked down a copy of her album. I was enchanted; it was a beautiful voice. It was literally just getting in touch, and sending her a piece of music and seeing what she thought, and if she was inspired by it. There was no problem if she didn't want to do it, it was just an exploratory sort of thing. We had a basic idea for the music worked out. Then she came to London, into our studio and hung out for a couple of days and went through different ideas. It's almost a combination of two ideas that she had, to combine two lyrics together. It's beautiful and her voice sounds incredible and surges with the music. It was exciting to work with people who we had preconceptions about, and also people who were damned fresh and exciting and don't have massive baggage going into the studio. There's no real expectation of what could happen…you know that they're talented musicians or talented singers, but you still don't know what's going to happen in the studio. We had just been e-mailing each other back and forth before she came…it felt different…I liked it.

KL: Who are The Magic Numbers?

TR: They're amazing, they're a band Ed saw play live in London one night and they were supporting this other band he'd had gone to see. He just phoned me up the next day saying he'd seen the best band in the world! (Laughs.) They hadn't released a record at that point, but he got hold of some demos of theirs. They've just signed to a friend of ours' label, Heavenly Records, who we used to do a club night with. And they're just amazing; a four-piece band with two brothers and two sisters in it, and three of them all sing in harmony and it's just incredible, it's infectious. Beautifully written songs and beautifully sung…they're just inspirational people. That was one of the highlights in making this record, was being in the studio with them. They've made one seven-inch now…that's all they've done…but they still have a very clear idea of what they do and how they do it. Hearing three beautiful voices sing together was a very exciting thing to do this year. If you like melodic, interesting, beautifully sung music then you'll like them.

KL: You always have these amazing send-off tracks at the end of all your albums, like "Private Psychedelic Reel" and "Dream On" for example, and with "Surface to Air" you've done it again. Was it written knowing it was going to be the last song on the album?

TR: Yeah, do you not feel it fits in with that? (Laughs.) We've always knew what would be the start of the album, with "Galvanize," and we kind of always knew the end of the album would be "Surface to Air." It's just got this joy in it; it's an optimistic piece of music we love. We've been playing it live this past summer, and the feeling it generates in a crowd of people is amazing. It's just a combination of the melody, the way it's put together and the interesting sounds. With the feel of this album—because you know Push the Button does have this quality of darker and harder moments, more so than maybe the last couple of albums—it just felt like an optimistic way to end the record. It's difficult to make music that's sounds joyous without it becoming contrived. The album felt like it had to end with an optimistic note, and the machine, when it sings (Rowlands quietly sings) "we helped to make the world you're living in better" (trails off)…we just thought it was the perfect way to finish the record.

KL: How did the title "Surface to Air" come about?

TR: Well "Surface to Air" was like a lot of other titles for us, it had this sort of dual meaning. We like the duality obviously of the missile connotation, but also we thought it was like the coming up to breathe kind of thing; you know like…almost at the end of the record there's this sort of escape, there's some lifting off, there's some ascension…leaving the bounds of earth about it. We liked that there could be that sort of positive way of reading it and this negative way of reading it also…that you're about to get blown up (chuckles sheepishly)!

KL: What about the future of dance/electronic music…in its evolution, what lies ahead?

TR: I think in dance music, in all electronic music or any music for that matter, it is constantly evolving and 'fear for its future' is not how I think about music. I'm not interested in monolithic shifts and predicting the future of things. I'm more into what's happening now, what record you bought yesterday, what club you're going to tonight, what music you're gonna hear, what people are excited about. Magazines and media don't really respond to things like that, they like things to move in big generational shifts, so they can say quite clearly that rock music is it right now and that dance music is dead…and that makes it a very clear thing for people to understand but it's not really how music works at all. I don't know why it's never really kicked off in America and Canada…but we were coming to North America in say 1993 and '94 playing to 20,000 people at a rave, and that was massive. But that was only an isolated thing, say in Florida, San Francisco, Toronto or New York. You find these hotbeds of things going on, but because it's such a big country there's no uniting, whereas in Europe if you have parties going on for 20,000 people in the two main cities of the country then that's a phenomenon, whereas in America or Canada that's an isolated incident. And also I think it's got to do with the fact that a lot of the radio stations are not open-minded, where Radio 1 in England is a commercial-free, liberated way of looking at music. They don't mind playing an obscure dance record that's been a big hit at Trash Club on Monday night against the latest Green Day single, but in a country where the radio stations are controlled by advertisers and market research, to them, those two things don't make sense and they confuse people so…well they don't really confuse people—people who place adverts think it confuses people…or maybe it's just the advertisers who are confused! People, from my experience, like to hear different types of music, like unexpected things, and in England we're just lucky to have Radio 1, I suppose.

The Chemical Brothers have been busily touring Australia during January and have a few dates in Japan at the beginning of February. They're in Europe and the UK for the most part up until the end of May. As no North American dates have yet been determined, stay tuned and hopeful for a summer tour.